Monday, June 29, 2009

Notable financing (PTEC)

AlphaNinja - I spend a considerable amount of time on this site writing about "notable financings," etc. I do this because the manner and price at which a company raises money tells us a lot about the company - both about the stability of earnings, and what the future cash flows might be like. If one of your neighbors is able to obtain a mortgage at 4.5% while the guy across the street pays 8%, you can extrapolate who is in a better earnings and liquidity situation. The same goes for stocks.

The following transaction would be the equivalent of a 12% mortgage with a 50% down payment.

Phoenix Technologies (PTEC) announced that it has "placed" 5.8million shares with certain private investors. In order to pull this off, the company had to offer shares at $2.25, a 29% discount to its previous close. Gross proceeds to the company will be $13million, but actual net proceeds will be about $12million. Hefty, hefty "transaction fees." The underwriting bank alone takes 5% of the offering, or $650k. Taking into account the other fees, and the offering price is more like $2.06, an even bigger discount than acknowledged.

For a look at why PTEC has to offer stock at such a discount, just a peek at the March quarter's results show us why. They burned through about $10mil in cash, so the $22mil remaining cash on the balance sheet will not be enough to carry the company through a prolonged "downturn," if that's what we want to call this.

Comments on cost-reductions:

"Our second quarter performance reflects the substantial impact of the weakened global economy on the PC industry," said President and CEO Woody Hobbs. "Inventory reductions across the global supply chain and reduced end-user PC demand drove weaker core systems revenues, and since we continued to fund important market adoption initiatives for our new products, our result was negative cash flow from operations for the quarter. In advance of these expected results, we took decisive actions to reduce our cost structure and improve operational efficiency."